From the Wall Street Journal, Contra Costa Times:

A group of influential Georgia legislators has introduced a bill that would make illegal some of the procedures used by Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old California woman who gave birth to eight babies through in vitro fertilization in January. Similar legislation has been introduced in Missouri.

“Nadya Suleman is going to cost the state of California millions of dollars over the years; the taxpayers are going to have to fund the 14 children she has,” Republican state Sen. Ralph T. Hudgens, one of the sponsors of the bill, said in an interview. “I don’t want that to happen in Georgia.”

The Georgia bill would limit the number of embryos that may be implanted to a maximum of three for a woman age 40 or older, and two for a woman younger than that.

Research has shown that multiple birth babies are significantly more likely to develop disabilities including cerebral palsy, neurological complications and learning disorders, as well as other long-term health issues. A multiple birth pregnancy also triples the mother’s risk of death.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

In an apparent reference to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, Pope Benedict XVI said Saturday that any type of discrimination based on genetics is an “attack against all of humanity.”

The remarks came during an audience with participants at a Vatican conference on “New Frontiers of Genetics and the Risk of Eugenics.”

While praising scientific progress that permits enhanced treatment for disease, the pope said medical advances have been accompanied by “worrisome displays” of discrimination that favor “efficiency, perfection and physical beauty at the expense of other forms of existence that are deemed unworthy.”

In PGD, embryos can be tested for genetic conditions like Down syndrome, sickle-cell anemia and cystic fibrosis before implantation in the uterus.

Procedure can save lives of kids with disabilities, he says

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Allen Goldberg says clinics that offer to screen embryos for eye color and hair color risk poisoning public opinion against a procedure that can be life-saving for some children with genetic disease.

Goldberg’s son, Henry, had Fanconi anemia, a rare and fatal genetic disease for which the only hope is a bone marrow transplant from a genetically matched sibling. Goldberg and his wife attempted to conceive a donor sibling for Henry through the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis, the same procedure that is now being marketed to create designer babies. An excerpt:

Henry was among the most optimistic, wise and courageous people I have ever met. We felt a great responsibility to do everything in our power to save his life. In the end, that wasn’t possible. But our efforts contributed to scientific knowledge, and for that we are grateful. Abusing that hard-won knowledge to capriciously choose hair color, eye color and other cosmetic traits in a baby is wrong and repugnant.

From the New York Times:

Women have been using in vitro fertilization for 30 years, and the results have been thought to be “reassuringly safe.” Now scientists are using new techniques to explore the long-term effects of IVF on gene expression and developmental patterns, and are starting to find a somewhat increased risk of genetic disorders and birth defects. An excerpt:

The findings are considered preliminary, and researchers say they believe IVF does not carry excessive risks. There is a 3 percent chance that any given baby will have a birth defect.

But the real question – what is the chance that an IVF baby will have a birth defect? – has not been definitively answered.

… “There is a growing consensus in the clinical community that there are risks,” said Richard M. Schultz, associate dean for the natural sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. “It is now incumbent on us to figure out what are the risks and whether we can do things to minimize the risks.”

From the New York Times, Associated Press:

The recent in vitro birth of octuplets to a woman who already had six children born through in vitro procedures has spurred new questions about the lack of regulation of the fertility industry.

Nearly a third of in vitro births involve twins or more. The government, along with professional associations, have been pushing fertility doctors to reduce that number, citing the disastrous health consequences that sometimes come with multiple births – infant mortality, low birth weights, long-term disabilities and thousands of dollars’ worth of medical care.

… [Nadya] Suleman, whose six older children range in age from 2 to 7, said three of them receive disability payments. She told NBC one is autistic, another has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD, and a third experienced a mild speech delay with “tiny characteristics of autism.” She refused to say how much they get in payments.

In California, a low-income family can receive Social Security payments of up to $793 a month for each disabled child. Three children would amount to $2,379.

From National Public Radio:

As a woman gave birth to octuplets at a hospital near Los Angeles on Monday, she let loose an intense debate about the ethics of megamultiple births.

… “I don’t know any case where some of the children were not severely disabled,” Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania tells NPR’s Madeleine Brand.

Caplan said the case raises a host of ethical questions about fertility treatments and multiple births: the likelihood of disabilities among the babies, the use of hospital resources, and the high cost of medical care to the mother and babies.

See also:

Octuplets’ mother already has twins, four other children — Los Angeles Times

Octuplets’ family filed for bankruptcy — CBS News

From the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Chicago Tribune and elsewhere:

Babies conceived with the help of medical technology are two to four times more likely to have certain types of birth defects than children conceived naturally, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Human Reproduction.

The report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found an elevated risk of heart defects, cleft lips and gastrointestinal defects.

Scientists emphasized that the problems were not lethal and that the individual risk of birth defects is small. For example, the risk of a baby in the United States being born with a cleft lip or without a palate is about 1 in 950, but the study found that the risk is 1 in 425 for babies conceived through infertility treatments.

About one percent of all births in the United States now occur with the help of infertility treatments, or double the rate recorded in 1996.